“The goodbye killed me, darlings. I felt like a moth clinging against her light, all the good and beauty she means. I’m so scared about what might go wrong for her while she’s away. The wounds on her face. Oh, my nonexistent, celestial darlings of readers, why can’t she see her breathtaking beauty? It breaks my heart over and over, finding new red lines on her skin. And yet I’m so, so, so broken myself. Are we just the blind leading the fucking blind, waiting til one of us finally topples into the chasm? The ravine of self destruction past the point where you can escape any more? My heart’s pounding with fear, rebelling furiously against my mind’s contemplation .
NO! Stop, stop, stop. No-one will ever die. We’re mending, we are we are we are we MUST.

I read her goodbye letter on a tearstained Elizabeth Street bench, legs too enfeebled to carry me any further, leaning on the crutch of my desire to exist, in the lack of any psychical strength. I cried and cried and cried, trying to hide behind coat sleeves and smoke wreathes. She somehowsomehow seems to love me, dear. I don’t care if I never achieve happiness if I had to sacrifice her love. “

My life feels ridiculous sometimes, too unlikely and overblown and well-dressed and carefully soundtracked. I cry and smoke and laugh raucously and kiss too many people and gaze out of café windows dreaming of the future.

This is youth. This is growth and love and pain.

Well, what do you know, a couple of hours of sitting in forests crying and listening to Bob Dylan can really change your perspective on life! Just kidding – everything’s still shit. But I did have a truly beautiful moment when I was gazing unhappily at the ground, when I realised through the sky’s reflection in a puddle that the clouds had blown away and the stars were out in their flocks – pale, wispy light-spots floating on the surface of the muddy, tea-coloured water. And yet – it seemed to be incredibly profound, especially once I recalled my Year Ten physics and realised that the stars were as far under the mucky surface as they were overheard – I was gazing through endless light-years in this mucky, shallow pool.

And then I spun on my heel, and the expanse of the cosmos just struck me down with its beauty.

I was so enchanted by these puddles, then, that I walked home through each and every one of them,  shoes, stockings and all; ankle-deep in bitterly cold rain, but somehow enlightened and alive.

Fuck it. Creation. That’s all it is here – people dragging things out of twisted imaginations and false recollections, cobbling them together to try to explain to each other what it is to be human. Fuck it! It’s beautiful, and tragic, and so … inescapable, the distances between people. My brain, your brain. They may be close enough to touch, but the neural circuiting might be in a whole different language. When you look at it – really take it apart and start to consider it – that’s all we’re any of us trying to do. To make brains make sense to each other. And it doesn’t matter whether that means being a starving poet hunched in a garret scrawling out a map of your soul, or whether you’ve got rubber gloves and a steel soul and a hippocampus half-dissected lying by your scalpel as you tremble with the thrill of it. We’re all just going around defining humanity, and getting all caught up in the mad rush of joy and despair and a thousand other nameless things that we drag along with it.

I don’t know if any of my wisdom is worth sharing. I don’t know if I’m qualified to give anything even approximating advice. I don’t know if this should bother me. I do know, however, that one of the truest joys is not to be hampered by this, and go through life a creature of mistakes, a wild tearing beast, but as well-meaning as you can manage. Fuck it.
I’ll write properly again soon, I’ll tear myself from the intoxicating well of self-reference, the world of ideas that draws in ever-tighter spirals around oneself – break from the mistaken idea that I’ve got so much to say about the immediate world swirling around me. Why I do labour under this strange certainty that one day someone will be so utterly fascinated by what I’ve got to say about my fucking university days? I don’t, for once, mean this in some sick self-deprecating way, I am honestly starting to be intrigued by my own urge to write – the sense that it’s doing someone some kind of good.”

You smell of incense and betrayal. You smell of all the things we could have been.

But I can’t look you in the eye anymore, because I remember how you taste.

I don’t want to save anyone. I’ve tried that

And I don’t want to be saved. I’ve tried that, too.

Both times it just ended up with everyone hurting.

.

I’ve never been this happy and it fucking terrifies me.

I finally have so much to lose.

I long for peace. It is close. It is coming. But I think I might destroy myself before it arrives.

.

I took too many sleeping pills and dreamt you were my child. I knelt at your feet and begged forgiveness. Life within and life without mirror perfectly, like the wings of the jar-trapped butterfly I keep to convince me of my power.

I feel like I live in a pair of parentheses

A secluded little world where I can ignore

Those harsh words printed directly onto the

coarse paper of life

Here in my bubble of denial, this enclosed little space

They can take me or leave me;

They make sense without me.

You make sense without me

And I can do just as I please.

*

What need have I for the greater story?

Inside these brackets a different tale is told

In my parentheses

                    I

                        Am partnerless

I divide up my cigarettes for a share of your sadness

And I parcel it up with a goodnight kiss.

And take it home and kick and scream on my floor,

revelling

in my

mortgaged melancholia

Sure, we’ve all been told to dance as though nobody’s watching, but have you tried actually dancing in a hall full of people where nobody can see each other? If not, you need to get your grooving ass down to No Lights No Lycra, where there are, as the name suggests, no lights. There are also no drinks, no self-consciousness, and if you dance long enough, no problems in the whole world as long as you keep on your light-hearted, light-heeled way.

*

I’m pretty much the whitest girl conceivable, and my extreme Anglo-Saxon identity unfortunately manifests itself in my dancing abilty. My standard move is a careful mix of jumping and flailing, or J&F, as those in the know call it. Luckily, at No Lights No Lycra, this doesn’t matter in the least. No matter how you’re dancing, you’ll never be the strangest-looking one in the room. In fact, the only way you can draw attention to yourself is by being inadequately enthusiastic. So while I did use a lot of my J&F style groove, I also got twirling, leaping, kicking and prancing. Some people chose to lie down on the floor for a bit while getting into the beat, or pirouetted gracefully around the periphery, but the presence of others is only vaguely at the edges of your vision and mind, as the focus of NLNL is all about dancing by yourself, whatever that means to you.

*

An hour and a half after we nervously crossed the threshold, my friends and I emerged, sweaty, aching and immensely joyful. I was struck by the fact that we had so many stores to exchange of our experience, despite having spent the whole session within a few metres of each other. And this afternoon, got down by study, the cat and I restaged an impromptu NLNL session in our living room. Because that’s the kind of life I have now.

Is this what it all come down to?

Quiet nights, records play low

As we sit, backs turned

And think back on a thousand closed doors

Memories of being something bigger than the words

With which we pinned outselves down.

It’s a stretching, twisted yearning.

*
The weight of days - the future bearing down-

Pushes you reluctantly into an acceptance of fact:

Time Does Pass!
No amount of our youth and ego and longing

and attempts to push-push-push at the dawn,

Spreading out gin-sticky fingers against its flaming curtains

and calling out to each other abut our ideas of eternity

(Shouting to be heard above the crackling, cackling flames of our mortality)

No - none of this can truly stop it.

*

We are the daughters and sons of those who dreamt

We are fed on nostalgia, on false dreams of

our today, since proven hollow.

We are a generation cultivating a secret yearning

Behind our public wontonness.

           Whatever we tell ourselves.

*

So I pickle myself in wine

And sneer at your latest letter.

And scrawl line  after self-serving line

Fuck - I hope we all get better